How sweet it is / The economics of beekeeping in Oakland

Published 4:00 am, Tuesday, June 2, 2009

Khaled Almaghafi is a beekeeper, swarm collector and honey seller in Oakland.

Khaled Almaghafi is a beekeeper, swarm collector and honey seller in Oakland.

Photo: Novella Carpenter

How sweet it is / The economics of beekeeping in Oakland

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Khaled Almaghafi's red pickup truck, parked along Telegraph Avenue, was attracting bees. Where they came from was unclear -- nearby there was only the California Highway Patrol offices, a funeral home and the concrete monolith of highway 980, none of which were harboring bees. Yet the insects had arrived, possibly attracted to the tall, slender Almaghafi himself. He is, after all, a honey man and a beekeeper.

Waving the bees away, I helped unpack a few farmer's market tables, bottles of honey and jars of pollen from the truck. We carried everything into Almaghafi's tiny honey shop near the corner of 36th Street and Telegraph in Oakland. I had come to meet with Almaghafi because he is one of the few city dwellers I know whose main source of income comes from working with bees. I wanted to know what it was like to depend on insects for one's livelihood.

The open door at Bee Healthy Honey (which doesn't keep regular business hours and is often closed because Almaghafi is mostly out in the field) wasn't just attracting bees: people started to appear as if they had been waiting months to get inside. A man on a motorcycle swerved over and parked directly in front of the shop. He wore vintage clothes and round spectacles.

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"You got the local honey, right?" he asked as he sauntered in, looking a little dusty from the road. He said his allergies were killing him -- and he believes, as does Almaghafi, that eating raw honey made from the nectar of the flowers that cause his allergies will build up immunity to the allergen.

"How much is the bottle, there?" the guy asked pointing to a quart jar.

"Seventeen dollars, but for you, I'll take $2 off," Almaghafi said from behind the counter.

The motorcycle guy didn't flinch at the price and bought two bottles and some pollen before motoring off. He spent $45, a bit more than the cost of a month's dose of Claritin allergy pills.

On the glass counter of Bee Healthy were stacks of postcards featuring a berry bush bristling with what looked to be thousands of bees nestled into a ball. The bee cluster is a called a swarm, something that might be considered unappetizing and even a little scary to some. But to a beekeeper and honey salesman, bee swarms represent a strong, healthy colony of bees. And to Almaghafi, swarms also mean money.

"I had a call last week out on 62nd from this guy [who] had bees in his walls," he said. "He made a small hole in the wall one night, and boom -- he had 50,000 bees in his kitchen."

Depending on the job, Almaghafi is paid $90-$350 to capture swarms and bees that have nested in trees, walls and roofs. Extracting the bees can be tricky. He sucks them out with a special vacuum that gently deposits the insects into a wooden box. Later, he transfers the bees into a proper beehive, and they become productive members of his bee colonies. "I call it recycling bees," he said.

A couple walked in. Almaghafi apologized for the close quarters of the shop, which is filled with bee and honey products displayed in hexagonal-shaped shelves. Wheels of yellow honey wax -- obtained from harvesting honey and used to make candles -- rested on the counter. The hexagonal-tiled floor was slightly sticky. The man and woman shyly said they wanted to become beekeepers.

Almaghafi's face lit up. He can get them bees, he assured them. "You know Michelle Obama is going to start a beehive at the White House," he told them. They nodded with excitement.

While they talked, I inspected a poster in the corner of the shop. It was a photo of some bees next to wax comb that spelled out the word "Allah." Almaghafi told me the Koran instructs Muslims to build houses for bees because they produce a variety of nectars that promote health. I stared at the poster: it was like a Muslim beekeeper's version of a Virgin Mary's image appearing in a tortilla.

The couple bought a book, and promised to return later to buy a nucleus colony, a small box of bees and honeycomb that's like a beekeeper's starter kit. After they left, Almaghafi and I retreated to the cafe next door, where an Ethiopian woman was roasting green coffee beans. We were caught downwind of the delicious smoke and, as we talked, I became more caffeinated than any other time in my life. Almaghafi told me the story of how he came to America from Yemen and came to rely on bees to make a living -- for good and bad.

When Almaghafi was growing up, his father was a beekeeper in Yemen, where honey is considered to be a kind of medicine. There is a particularly rare Yemeni honey made from acacia trees that grow only in the desert, Almaghafi noted; it fetches $100 per kilo because the honey is collected from bees that are carted around on camel-driven carts. Before the 1950s, Yemeni beekeepers often used hollowed out logs to keep their bees, but Almaghafi's father introduced modern beehives -- modular, stackable boxes with removable frames called Langstroth hives. His bees flourished, and soon other beekeepers in Yemen tried the new way.

Wanting to know more about modern beekeeping, Almaghafi came to California in 1986 when he was in his early 20s. The plan was to attend UC Davis and eventually earn a PhD, focusing on bee research. But it turned out Almaghafi couldn't afford school and instead got a job at a gas station. His father had taught him about beekeeping, though, and he began to raise bees on the side.

His bees thrived, and when he returned to Yemen to visit his father, he would bring queen bees to share, smuggled in his shirt pocket. They were secured in a small "queen box" the size of matchbox and fed with a plug of sugar candy.

At the height of his beekeeping career, Almaghafi had 350 colonies, or hives, of bees. Since bees pollinate crops, many farmers pay beekeepers to truck their beehives out to the fields to increase fruit or vegetables yields. In the 1980s and 1990s, farmers would pay Almaghafi about $35 per colony of bees brought to the fields and left for a few weeks to pollinate crops like peaches, apricots or melons.

In 2003, the almond market transformed Almaghafi's business. Due to increasing demand worldwide, almond prices suddenly began climbing. Became California grows 80 percent of the world's almonds, and the nut trees depend on bees to pollinate them, beekeepers suddenly found themselves being wooed by almond farmers.

"We made $160-$170 per colony," Almaghafi said. Meaning that a beekeeper could bring 100 boxes of bees to an almond orchard in February, leave them for a month, then take them home, and he would gross more than $15,000. Sounds good, but before you rush out to become a commercial beekeeper, know that beekeeping equipment is expensive: a bee box with frames and supers alone costs at least $150; and then you have to pay for the bees, which can run $100 for a single colony. In the short term, it's a money loser.

With more and more almonds being planted (in 2007 there were 1,200 square miles of almonds in the Central Valley) farmers began to hire bee brokers who would negotiate prices with beekeepers and make sure they weren't ripping the farmer off by sending in weak bees. The brokers in turn hired inspectors to open up each bee box to gauge the health of a hive.

Every year, Almaghafi steadily upgraded his equipment and planned to do more pollination work. In 2007, according to bee expert Randy Oliver, bee pollination services made more income for beekeepers than the value of all the honey they produced. Paradoxically, that was the year that Almaghafi stopped doing pollination: his bees began dying, just as they had been doing all over the country.

In the spring of 2007, there were 30-60 percent bee losses on the West Coast. Almaghafi's hives dwindled from 350 to 70. No one knows what killed the bees, but scientists call it Colony Collapse Disorder or CCD.

Almaghafi thinks the die-off came from a combination of stress and pollution in the air and soil. Of course, the collapse was hard on him financially, but he's slowly building up his colonies again.

Though 70 colonies isn't sufficient to do pollination, Almaghafi collects enough honey from hives that he maintains in El Sobrante, Lafayette and Pleasanton to do a brisk business at his shop and local farmers markets. He's also selling honey to high-end markets in Europe, and of course, doing bee removal services. At the age of 45, he is slowly building up his colonies again.

There have been tragedies in Almaghafi's life lately. His 82-year-old father was murdered this year by a local sheik in Yemen who was angry about a land dispute. Meanwhile, Almaghafi discovered he can't pass on the family business to his son because the child, now five years old, is allergic to bee stings.

Still, Almaghafi has concocted a plan to keep up the beekeeping tradition. He makes regular visits to local schools to tell kids about bees and their important work. He wants to start a bee school to train beekeepers, with the hope that eventually he'll find someone to help him with his business.

I asked him if he's going to start doing pollination again. Prices this year were hovering around $100 per colony, which is good but not great. Although almonds are still a major cash crop, more and more farmers are getting bees from Australia to pollinate the almonds.

Still, for Almaghafi, money isn't the only motive.

"You know, it is our duty as beekeepers to do [this work]," Almaghafi said while sipping his coffee, whose berries had no doubt been pollinated by bees. "You feel good providing that service. To continue the cycle, to feel connected to the land."

A citizen of Oakland, Novella Carpenter reports on food, farming and culture. Her work has appeared in Mother Jones, Salon.com, Edible San Francisco and other publications. Her memoir about urban farming is forthcoming from Penguin Press. She keeps a blog about city farming at www.novellacarpenter.com